By Anne Bremer During one of our recent warm, clear, blue-skied summer days, I was walking my dog through our neighborhood park when I saw something moving from the corner of my eye. A Hot Cheetos chip bag was caught in the bushes, flapping feebly in the gentle breeze as though trying to escape. Perhaps you can relate to the series of thoughts that subsequently raced through my mind: “Who threw that there? What a litterbug! Why can’t people throw their trash where it belongs? Do people really need to buy such heavily packaged and processed snacks?” As a friend and supporter of The …
Ebb & Flow
The Newsletter of The Watershed Project
What’s in Your Watershed: Milkweed: Much More Than a Weed
By Charlotte Pitt Names are often deceiving, and that is certainly the case for the flowering plant commonly known as Milkweed. Plants are considered to be weeds when they are unwanted, but Milkweed is definitely a plant you want to keep around! There are nineteen species of Milkweed native to California, and they are both a beautiful plant that makes an eye-catching addition to any garden and an important habitat and food plant for caterpillars, particularly the caterpillars of the Monarch butterfly. Nine species of Milkweed act as the only food source for the Monarch caterpillars, so …
UC Berkeley Students Share Takeaways from their Experience Making Educational Videos for TWP
By Michael Gee and Eddie Kinyon This past year, three undergraduate students at UC Berkeley supported The Watershed Project by filming and editing two educational videos that answer two questions: 1) What is a watershed? And 2) how does pollution move through an urban watershed? We asked them to share about their experience and what they learned through the process, and here is what they have to say: The feeling of microscopic needles drawing venom into my hand. I look down and see a plant. Eddie, my groupmate scans it: Stinging nettle. All around us, the water drifts by ever so …
TWP Education in Review
By Dan Kirk If our Education Department had a menu and our educators were actually chefs, our signature dish would be Youth Experiencing Nature (a pasta dish with pasta in the shape of smiley faces and redwood trees) with a side of the Watershed Awareness medley. This past year, we would add another popular item called Mental Health Awareness, served raw. Both dishes would pair well with 1999 Unplug-from-the-Device Pinot Noir (tasting notes include: Struggles, soft tannins, clear mind, minerals, mindfulness and nature journals). Like many good chefs, our chefs watch with a keen eye as each …
What’s in Your Watershed: Opossums Demystified
By Calvin Abbott There are probably few people in the Bay Area who aren’t aware of opossums, but in talking to people recently I realized there are also few people who know much more than what they look like, or that they like to be in trees. Where I live in Richmond, opossums are in a category I like to think of as uncommon and omnipresent. I never see a lot of opossums at once, I don’t see them every day or even every week, but it is also not surprising when one does show up in one of my fruit trees, or curled up in the hay in my garden. What was surprising, however, was when my cat …
From Hellstrips to Community Spaces: Hope Gardens 2021
By Dan Kirk Back in the ’90s, the term “hellstrip” was coined to describe the area between the sidewalk and the street. If you are to drive, walk, bike, etc. around the city, you will probably notice that most of these spaces are just grass and trees, which can quickly become weed patches, easy to overlook and trample on. If one is going to allow nature to grow in a space like that to “beautify” a block or a neighborhood, then one aught to change what is planted there. Maybe, eventually, a new name will define the green space between the sidewalk and the road. For now, we at the Watershed …
Opening of the Wildcat Creek Restoration and Greenway Trail
By Dan Kirk There are many creeks and streams that flow through East Bay watersheds, and for the most part, they are not in their natural form. Up in the hills towards the east, you may be able to see streams, walk near them and maybe dip your toes in them if there isn’t a sign telling you otherwise. In the more urbanized areas down towards the bay, the streams are often hidden, underground, engineered, dirty, and don’t have a suitable creek ecosystem to support them. As cities try to support community health, transportation, and ecosystem resilience, among other things, sometimes this …
What’s in Your Watershed: Life in Our Streams
By Olivia Rose The San Francisco Bay Watershed connects communities across more than 75,000 square miles throughout the state of California, and just tickles the southeast corner of Oregon. From the Sierra Nevada mountains down to the San Francisco Bay and ocean, this watershed provides drinking water for more that 25 million people, and is home to countless numbers of nonhuman living plants, insects, birds, fish, and animals. So how can we ensure that these communities, connected by water, are thriving and healthy? Well first, as with any good relationship, we need to check in first to see …
